Sunday, January 8, 2017

The Destroyers (US/Philippines Action, 1985)

1985 - The Destroyers (Rodeo
Productions)

[US/Filipino co-production with
Cirio H. Santiago's Premiere Productions, supervised by Roger
Corman's Concorde-New Horizons. Filmed as "King's Ransom",
released in the US as "The Devastator", in West Germany as
"Force Commando", in Spain as "Destructores", in
Portugal as "Os Implacáveis Destruidores", and in Poland
as "Dewastator"]

Troubled Vietnam vet Deacon
Porter (Deathstalker's Rick Hill) is called to the sleepy mountain
town of King's Ransom - once again, Baguio in northern Luzon! - by
his former commanding officer's widow (Bobby Greenwood), and finds a
sympathetic face in young lass Audrey (Katt Shea), a community in the
grip of powerful dope grower Carey (Crofton Hardester) and his
private army, and the town's sheriff (Naked Vengeance rapist Kaz
Garas) on Carey's payroll. After he's left for dead in his car's
smoking wreckage, Porter gathers his army buddies (including Terrence
O'Hara and Bill McLaughlin, also in Naked Vengeance) and returns to
King's Ransom armed to the teeth with guns and explosives to blast
their way through Carey's goons, his marijuana fields, and even the
local dam. Loud, dumb, over the top and entertaining as hell,
courtesy of a script by Joe Zucchero, crams in the gun blasts, an
exploding chopper (a Roger Corman stand-by!), and even 'Nam
flashbacks courtesy of Cirio's own Final Mission (1984), and most of
Cirio's regulars are along for the bumpy ride - Carey's executioners
include David Light, Don Gordon Bell (who shoots a teen sniffing
around Carey's pot plants in cold blood, then announces proudly,
"Nailed me a college kid!"), Nick Nicholson, Bill Kipp,
Steve Rogers and Berto Spoor, Henry Strzalkowski has a
micro-appearance as the sheriff's deputy, and an uncredited Nigel
Hogge shows up in an Arab headdress and boot polish as a gun buyer.
Along with much of Cirio's mid-Eighties output for Corman's
Concorde-New Horizons, it's classy top-shelf B flick; The Dam Busters
it ain't, but then that so-called classic never featured a hero
dangling from a helicopter, tossing a grenade into the cabin, then
plunging into the water as the blades go up in a fireball…

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HERR LEAVOLD

Andrew Leavold owned and managed Trash Video, the largest cult video rental store in Australia, from 1995 to 2010. He is also a film-maker, published author, researcher, film festival curator, musician, and above all, unrepentant and voracious fan of the pulpier aspects of genre cinema. His writing has been published globally in mainstream magazines, academic journals and underground cinema fanzines, for the last two decades.

Leavold toured the world with his feature length documentary The Search For Weng Weng (2013). His ten years of research on genre filmmaking in the Philippines formed the basis of Mark Hartley's documentary Machete Maidens Unleashed! (released internationally in 2010), on which Leavold is also Associate Producer, and he has since been recognized both in the Philippines and abroad as the foremost authority in his area of expertise, teaching Philippine film history at university level in Australia, the United States, and throughout the Philippines. Leavold teamed with Daniel Palisa to co-direct The Last Pinoy Action King (2015), both a feature-length documentary on the late Filipino action idol Rudy Fernandez, and a dissection of film royalty, politics, privilege, idolatry, and the Philippines’ pyramid of power.

He is currently shooting two new feature-length documentaries – The Most Beautiful Creatures On The Skin Of The Earth (also with Palisa), the third in his Filipino trilogy, about erotic cinema under Marcos; and Pub, a history of the vibrant St Kilda music scene as told through its most outrageous progeny, Fred Negro. Both films are due for release in 2018.